About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
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April 30, 2007
You may recall, good readers, that I brunched and spent time with the friends last weekend. I might have mentioned, also, that we’re all at different places in our financial lives. Purtroppo (unfortunately), I forgot that one of the girls I could always rely on to be a fellow starving-college-student budgeteer is now working a real job with real pay and … is living on her own with no dependents.
As she lamented her recent weight loss but not in the *ahem* assets, that made a $150 dress fit perfectly but for one key area, I said, “Hey, it’s a good thing you can’t fit into a dress you can’t afford anyway, right?”
Friend: “Of course I can afford it.”
*thwomp* Now where did my foot go…? Ahh… yes.
April 28, 2007
You know that feeling when there are a hundred different issues and priorities floating in your mind, all vying for attention like a horde of kids swarming a favorite cousin? And then you have to firmly set them all down and explain in detail the distinct characteristics of a line, and the formation thereof? Else you’re just going to leave and not a one of them will be satisfied, darn it!!? Yeah, that’s about it right now.
The kids: “hard” finance, “soft” finance, “maintenance” finance, etc.
1. Hard:
~ Selecting funds for my new retirement plan with a 10% company match, and making sure that it jives with my existing supplemental retirement plan to which I’ll continue contributing. Roughly, 5% of my income is only approximately 1/3 of the amount I contribute paycheckly, so I’m making up the other 2/3 through the unmatched plan. It makes sense simply because I’m not out of pocket much more or less, and since my income fluctuates anyway, it’d be nigh on impossible to figure out exactly what 5% means in every OT scenario. I don’t have that luxury of time, I should be working!
Since I’m sticking with Vanguard, I’m considering an asset allocation composed of the following funds:
VTSMX – Total Stock Market Fund
– Large Cap Fund
– Mid-Cap Fund
– Small-Cap Fund
– Emerging Markets Value Fund
– International Growth Fund
2. Soft:
~ Fill out the DMV’s SR-1.
~ Start selecting body shops to get the estimates for the car.
3. Maintenance:
~ Cut the rent check
~ Decide if it’s worth spending X amount from my personal care account for something I can probably do on my own, just not as well. (This is a matter of time, which I don’t have as well, and I actually don’t have much wiggle room in the budget, so I’ll just do it myself.)
4. Etcetera:
~ Get ready for the Little Boss’s lunch out in the (bourgie) boonies. Have to rely on a friend for a ride because we’ve two cars between three people, and Ma&PaDucky have conflicting schedules today.
~ Consider Little Boss’s wife’s job offer. It wasn’t a firm offer, per se, but she was looking into finding openings for Pa and didn’t have anything that fit for him at the time. She suggested that I consider taking on a sales position with her team part-time because it has greater earning potential than any other part-time gig I could have. Except, I’m the total opposite of a sales personality. Anyway, this is probably a topic for an entirely different post.
April 26, 2007
I’d been eagerly awaiting the infusion of Citi Thank You Flight points from the Vietnam trip: a little over 30,000 points! Except I completely forgot that they will only release Flight Points up the number of regular Thank You points that have been transferred from that card to your Thank You account. You have to earn the equivalent number of Spend points to get your Flight points.
Since I earned approximately 3000 regular points buying the flights to Vietnam, and got a bonus 15,000 points with my first purchase, PremierPass only liberated 17000 Flight points. Curses! And I’ve already charged my insurance to my regular use card, so that’s one fewer big-ticket item I can use to emancipate those remaining points.
Though I generally use credit cards to pay as many bills as possible and can switch to this card (insurance, cell phones, internet, cable) it still doesn’t add up to spending $14,000, and certainly not in the next 8 months (because I’m not keeping this card w/ a $75 annual feel)! Hm, any ideas?
April 25, 2007
My Obsessions Five just doesn’t quite ring the same.
Moom tagged me a few days ago. There’s an odd voyeuristic sort of fun to this particular meme because it’s fun reading about everyone’s obsessions, but am I really obsessed? Only time will tell. (And deprivation.)
There’s the obvious one: finances. I all too clearly enjoy the time I spend with my finances: nurturing, lecturing, egging them on. It’s probably borderline OCD because I get panicky if I’ve missed tending to them for more than a couple days. Almost nothing gets me as juiced up as talking, reading or discussing financials and ways to make, save and save’n’save money. And it’s so difficult not to go all evangelical whenever I see or hear my hapless audience going all squinty-eyed, even over the phone I can hear them do it, I swear, as I gabble on about how finances Can Be Fun.
Reading: Everything. Books, short stories, newspapers, magazines, blogs, comics, webcomics, commentary on webcomics, emails ….. everything. These days I have to move away from just reading quantity and selecting more quality but back in the day I always had my nose buried in a book no matter what I was doing. Even when we were reading a class-assigned book, I’d be reading my own book simultaneously. Yeah, that made the teacher really happy. I always wondered if I could be paid to read when I grew up. I should have specified that I wanted to be paid to read what I wanted to read, but …. well, I wasn’t so much a details kind of kid.
This practically deserves its own category but it’s still reading: I love comics. When I have disposable income, my drug of choice is primarily trade paperbacks, or graphic novels, now but that’s more of a practicality based on saving money on buying a single book collecting the monthly issues once every six months, and my patience factor of zero. I’m old, I can’t bear the anticipation of reading 15 pages of comic a month and then sit back to wait another month for my next installment. Then too, there’s the highly inefficient storage system I’ve got going on now, which is a short box under my bed and another one next to it, trades on the bookshelf. I admit it, I can’t wait to have my own house so that I have a real library and a wall dedicated to my comics and trades. San Diego Comic Con = Mecca.
Organizing/Planning: Office Birthday Monkey, Friends’ Birthday Alarm, Shindig Instigator. That’s me! And it’s automatically a surprise. It just is. And never happier am I than when obsessing over something, be it money, what I’m going to be when I grow up, when I’m going to grow up, or how I’m going to accomplish my goals that I previously obsessed over setting. You get the picture. I still haven’t reached conclusions for many of the those things but the act of obsessing is oddly filling.
Food: Food and I, we have an understanding. Except mushy/funny texture foods like ripe bananas, beans, mushrooms, etc. Approximately 60% of our office conversations revolve around food: what we’re craving, recipe exchanges, what’s for lunch, what’s for lunch tomorrow, desserts, food pictures, and the like.
Cleaning: By nature I’m a packrat, but only cyclically. The frugal part of me always stashes everything from ribbons on presents to half eaten energy bars because you never know when you might need that particular color of ribbon, and you certainly can’t throw food away! You can eat it later. But then, I’ve assisted in many a home-moving expedition and the idea of putting a bunch of stuff in a box, hauling said crap to another location, and having unpack that box eighteen months later is utterly revolting. If I don’t need it now, tomorrow, next week or next season, I don’t need it. Junk gets rounded up and donated, sold or chucked on a semi-regular basis. This brings enormous satisfaction.
And: Wanda, Tired of Being Broke, Golbguru, I tag you!
Here’s an interesting twist I didn’t see coming: The university has posted our new retirement plan information online, which I’ve filled out, so all I have to do now is decide which funds I want. The matched 5% goes to the 401(a) and is less than my current contribution, so I’m going to continue to contribute to the Supplemental Plan [my current 403(b)] as well. Turns out they allow me to contribute to different vendors for each plan. So, do I want to branch out to Fidelity/Prudential/TIAA-CREF plus Vanguard? Or just stick with Vanguard? (Ok, probably not TIAA-CREF, I’ve heard too many horror stories about them.)
On one hand, I feel uneasy about keeping all my money in one basket. On the other hand, it’s probably better to keep all the accounts under one roof. That way, I’ll pay fewer fees for non-retirement account investments when I become a valuable, high-account-balance customer.
In the meantime, I should re-evaluate the funds I’ve got and whether or not I want to change my allocations.
April 23, 2007
Excerpts from a Sunday afternoon:
Friend 1: Are you wearing eyeliner?
Friend 2: No.
Friend 1: Are you wearing fake eyelashes?
Friend 2: Yes.
Friend 1: Are you wearing blush?
Friend 2: Yes.
Friend 1: You’re so rosy! Mine’s just eczema.
Friend 1: Uh, that’s not how you dance to Cheap Trick. I don’t know how you dance to them, but that’s not it.
Friend 1: Are you coming to the mall with me?
Friend 2: When will we be back?
Friend 3: Can we get back by 6?
Friend 1: Well, I’m just returning something …. I could be back by 4.
Friend 3: I never return stuff.
Friend 1&2: That’s why we shop from your closet.
Friend 3: Oh. Man.
Friend 1: Michael’s not a bad guy, he’s just REALLY into finance so sometimes he doesn’t have anything to talk about. We talk about clothes. He … made a joke about the Exponential Curve. Once in a while, we’ll throw something about interest out there and he gets all excited.
Me (wasn’t listening until “finances”): Ooh! Interest rates!! Uh, oh. Hi, I’m Michael.
April 22, 2007
A work acquaintance spent last week nagging me about my boring life, and how I needed to get out and have more fun “at my age.” After some thought, it didn’t seem like such a bad notion to enjoy life a bit more and I resolved to go with the flow if merrymaking plans arose, rather than squashing them with my usual “I’ve got to work” mutter.
Well, you know how that goes…. you don’t just ease into it, life just comes at you in a torrent of commitments. I planned to get my hair cut on Saturday and take BoyDucky’s friend out for lunch or dinner for his 30th birthday on Sunday. Friday evening, I swear, I could hear the gods tittering at my “planning”. This is how the story really goes:
Friday: My state tax refund hit my account, yay!
Saturday: A good friend’s mom turned 60, so I was invited to a surprise birthday lunch. After lunch, East Coast Friend (ECF) proceeded to find and buy me an awesome pair of sunglasses because she a) has been looking for sunglasses for me since high school, and b) she knew I was knee deep in no-spend month 1. I really only looked because I figured we’d have no luck again, I definitely didn’t expect her to get them for me!
Saturday afternoon: I was asked to relief babysit for BoyDucky’s brother and sis-in-law so BoyDucky’s family could have a family birthday dinner. Except I got into an accident on the freeway to the house. The idiot driving an SUV pulled that cutting-across-four-lanes move, and was going to take out the front of my car, so I had to pull into the first lane to try and avoid him. He hit the rear tire of my car anyway, and caused another car to go spinning across the highway behind us. My tire is flat, the hubcap is gone, and the wheel well is beat up. It could have been a lot worse, considering what he was doing, but now I have to deal with insurance, fixing my tire, fixing my car…… *sigh* Geebus. Babysitting Backup Friend (BBF) and I shared our consolation prize: Costco Dog and salad. As we were over an hour late to babysit, BoyDucky’s family postponed their dinner plans until Sunday. So that meant that the originally planned birthday dinner had to become a Sunday brunch. Except we were meant to have brunch with ECF and Co.
Sunday: We tried to schedule one earlier and one later, but ultimately had to split up for our respective brunches, instead. Then we gals had some good clean fun at ECF’s house w/ECF playing hairdresser and the rest of us playing Care Bears: The Game That Melts Cold Hearts. No reading required. Ages 4-8. Doesn’t that motto strike anyone as a little mean?
I’m back now, with Moom’s tag to work on, dinner to make and work to do. *Sigh* I can’t wait to hide at home next weekend!! (with my spiffy new sunglasses perched atop my shaggy hair, of course.)
Oh, and Stater Bros. has their Ragu pasta sauces on sale for 99 cents a jar. Silver lining, anyone?
Spendy spendy:
$5, Costco
$0, sunglasses (courtesy ECF)
$0, Sunday brunch (courtesy BBF)
$???, car accident